June 2011
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The Bishop Who Ate His Boots
In September 1909, Bishop Isaac Stringer left Fort McPherson for Dawson City with a native guide named Enoch and Charles F. Johnson. The route was 500 miles of some of the most treacherous trail ever travelled in the Yukon. It had taken some of the stampeders of the Klondike gold rush a decade before two years and the Rat River Divide claimed more lives than all the other trails travelled during...
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Land of the Midnight Sun
The first hens imported in Dawson City at the turn of the century would not, as is usual with hens, roost until dark. Of course, these hens were not accustomed to the 24-hour daylight of the Yukon summers and as a result would pass out from fatigue where they stood. As a result, local hen owners were forced to develop shuttered hen houses where they could put their birds during the bright...
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Do you know, there's a thing called a face spider....
You may write the greatest show on earth, but Stephen Moffat, you are going to give me a heart attack one of these days.
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I like living in a town that has community...
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“There is a land of pure delight,
Where grass grows belly high,
Where horses...”
– blazed on a tree by a Klondiker
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So you want to talk like a Klondike stampeder?...
Then there’s Chinook Jargon, a pidgin of about 250 words made up of simplified Chinook words from Oregon and Washington combined with other Native American, English, and French terms first put down in writing by Catholic missionaries.
Common words:
skookum = big, strong, or having rapids
chuck = water
cultus = worthless
mel-ass = molassas.
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So you want to talk like a Klondike stampeder?...
“Stampeders” are everyone who participated in a gold rush (they all arrive in the area like a stampede).
All newcomers are “cheechakos.” After a cheechako survives his first Yukon winter, he can call himself a real ”sourdough.”
The sourdough flapjacks commonly eaten by stampeders are “sinkers.”
Stewed or baked beans are...
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The Gay Nineties
The last transcontinental railroad, the closing of the frontier, crippling depression, William Jennings Bryan, a gold rush, and a war - what on earth are people saying was happy about this decade?
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The park service is full of nerds.
Words of wisdom from Jim in Archaeology: “Uruk-hai are like giant walking sausages.”
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Oh the horror!
Many stampeders who made it to Dawson City during the height of the gold rush were dismayed to discover that all the good creeks had been staked long before. A significant number ended up turning to manual labor, of which there was a constant need. Nearly 100 male laborers reported “wood chopper” as their occupation in 1901. A good supply of fuel for the long Yukon winter was so...
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The Hurdling Death Machine
In the 1890s the United State army began experimenting with bicycles for its troops. At the time, European armies were testing them and the Japanese had already used bicycles in both Korea and Manchuria.
The 25th infantry, one of four “colored” infantries in the army at the time, conducted many of the most extensive bicycle field trials, though the “wheelmen” never used...
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“Wild excitements, misery, riches, debauchery, broken hearts, scurvy, frostbite,...”
– Nevill Armstrong, stampeder on the city that was “the Golden Mecca of the North”
To my new (and newish) followers:
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I'm watching a fat bear eat dandelions on Dyea Rd....
This was in a text I received this morning. Best thing I have heard all day.
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Bloody Hell
Alaska has two dozen varieties of mosquitoes.
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ashmonster91 replied to your photo: The water in the Bridal Veil Falls rushes 6,000 ft…
I’m fairly certain that I would have a photogasm if I was in your place.
I’m fairly certain you would. I almost feel guilty about it.
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Polly Put the Kettle On
In the fall of 1897, water levels in the Yukon too low for sternwheelers meant a food shortage in Dawson City, the backwoods metropolis of the Klondike gold rush. The American Congress, in order to keep its citizens from starving, spent $200,000 to buy and ship a herd of 539 reindeer from Norway to Dawson. They arrived in Dyea (close to where I am now) in May. Finally, the 114 reindeer that...
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